“With Hollywood sweating over piracy and record labels crying over losses, activity on peer-to-peer file-sharing networks has emerged as the most reliable barometer for determining what’s hot and what’s not among the most tech-savvy media consumers.”
Tag: 12.27.07
Cable Networks Face Identity Crisis
“As cable TV has exploded into hundreds of channels with countless programs, networks must grow increasingly sophisticated to stand out amid the competition, develop an identity and maintain their double-digit annual growth. Some, such as Court TV, have relied as much on psychographics as demographics to figure out who their audience is and how to reach potential viewers.”
Ruling: Tiny Country Can Violate US Copyright
“The Caribbean nation of Antigua and Barbuda has won the right to waive U.S. copyrights in films, television and music under an unusual ruling by the World Trade Organization. The landmark decision by the Geneva-based trade watchdog means that the tiny islands are able to violate intellectual property protection worth up to $21 million as part of a dispute between the countries over online gambling.”
Dancing Was A Ratings Winner, Why Not Choirs?
NBC’s choir competition was a ratings winner last week. “Each of the four episodes of NBC’s “Clash of the Choirs” did better. The best night of the series that featured celebrities cobbling together singing groups had 8.3 million viewers, Nielsen said.”
MIA: The Effective Protest Song
“The protest song has arrived at an odd place: more necessary than ever, and more marginal, too. The under-the-radar quality of modern tunes of dissent points to an artistic problem. Compared with so many topical diatribes that came before, too many rely more on bile than beat.”
Chunky Move(s) Into Technology
“A German interactive software creator and a team of lighting and sound technologists track the dancers’ movements through an infra-red beam. The movements are then reproduced as patterns which appear on a large screen that dominates the performance space, or as sounds we hear. As in Glow, Chunky Move’s most recent success, the technology is part of the performance.”
Time To Retire The “Classical Music Is Dying” Meme
There’s just too much evidence to the contrary, writes John Terauds. In Toronto, concerts sell out routinely, and there’s excitement abou what comes next. “Look at the brisk classical music and opera ticket sales in Toronto, and you can only conclude that it’s because the quality must be good.”
Inside Leonard Feather’s Private Bootleg Jazz Collection
“Included in the collection are about 50 of Feather’s ‘Blindfold Tests,’ where he interviewed greats like Benny Goodman with their eyes covered, an effort to promote fair critiques of new strains of jazz based on how they sounded, not who was playing them.”
Schools Teaching Comics See Surge In Applications
“Much of the credit goes to the emergence in the 1980s of graphic novels, which offer more complex story lines for more mature audiences than traditional comic books do. They typically are more durably bound and longer than the floppy comic magazines that told the tales of Superman or the antics of small-town teenager Archie Andrews and friends.”
Hollywood 2008 Prediction: Even More Movies
“The way Hollywood is trying to goose the number of admissions is a costly exercise in Darwinism: It simply keeps releasing more and more films. In 2004, 474 new movies arrived in the multiplex, according to the Motion Picture Assn. of America. By 2006, the volume of new releases had surged almost 30% to 599. If you had to choose among half a dozen movies opening most weekends, 2007 didn’t seem any less crowded.”